Allah Defies Gender, Why Can't I?: Religion, Queerness, and Performance

Abstract

This thesis explores how people perform their religious identities, commitments, and ambivalences, taking special interest in the negotiations of queerness and religious belonging and of dance and spiritual practice. I use three methods to consider three sites: 1) rhetorical analysis of digital resources for queer Muslim youth; 2) ethnography of Princeton’s student Christian dance company; 3) autoethnography of my (queer? Muslim?) improvisational dance practice. The first chapter examines how online brochures employ the analytics of social constructivism to argue that queerphobia is man-made whereas queerness is Islamic, overwriting the discursive incompatibility of queerness and Muslimhood with a divine compatibility. The second chapter demonstrates how religious performance is imbricated in and made possible through ‘secular’ social conventions, particularly by exploring how questions of skill surface in an inclusive Christian dance environment. The third chapter looks to my own dance practice to ask how the theories of queer performativity might bear on the practices that constitute religion: if queerness is improvised and enacted through doing and dancing, can the same be said for my queer Muslimhood? Altogether, this thesis proposes and takes a performative approach to study how people ‘do’ their religions and strive to belong.